CONGRATULATIONS! You are now a level 19 Woodcrafter! You have 1 free attribute point and 1 class attribute point to allocate. Your class attributes are Perception and Sensitivity.

He put one point in Perception and one in Sensitivity, as usual. Dumping everything into his class stats was kind of insane, and if it didn't earn him a new class by level 24, he'd probably stop. An unbalanced build had plenty of drawbacks.

He made sure they had all the materials and tools for another shack within arm's reach. He checked twice, then sat in the middle and took a deep breath.

“Instant Crafting,” he said, unnecessarily.

Spell failed! Not enough mana.

His shoulders sagged. It was worth a shot.

The others immediately realized what had gone wrong. “Don't worry, Josh!” Ruth cheered. “You'll get it eventually!”

“How much is the mana cost, out of curiosity?” Darius asked.

Josh checked his status. Now that he had tried the spell once, he could see the cost. He could even see the breakdown and calculation of each individual part, the percentage discount for efficiency, and then the flat discount for his high Sensitivity.

He stared at the number.

Darius gave him a wry chuckle. “That high?”

Josh put his face in his hands. “It's basically the cost of casting the spell about a hundred times, with the discount from my Sensitivity only applying once at the end.”

Darius nodded. “That is how combination spells normally work. Though I doubt there are any others so complex.”

Ruth cocked her head to the side. “What about combination techniques?”

Darius dismissed that with a wave of his hand. “Far more rare, but they follow the same rules.”

“Yeah,” Mary piped up. “When physical-types like me talk about combos, we mean using one technique after another. You've got to time everything perfect so your stamina regenerates at the right time.”

Ruth turned to Josh, eyes shining. “Can we practice that the next time we exercise?”

He resisted the urge to laugh. “You get a combat class when I wasn't looking? The only techniques you got are those carving things.” Woodcrafter might be fairly balanced between physical and magical, but Enchanter appeared to be almost entirely magical. He still wasn't sure why she insisted on joining him on his morning workout. He figured she'd lose interest soon.

Ruth pouted. “I still want to try.” She sighed. “Maybe I should take another bloodstone at level 24, try to move to a combat role.”

Josh gave the others glances. Darius looked horrified, but Mary just shrugged.

“We won't stop you,” Josh promised. “You're valuable to the team like this, though.”

“Yay, I can make heavier axes and lighter carts,” Ruth said dully. “Hooray for me.”

“Well, maybe it's time to come up with some more tricks.” He reached down and picked up his ax—wincing at the missing fingers yet again—before hooking it into his belt. “Come on. It's too late to keep going today. You can think about it at the inn.”

It was fully dark by the time they got back to the inn. They ate their dinners and retreated up to their rooms, though Josh took a moment to explain to Manny that they wouldn't need them after tonight.

Then, because it wasn't that late, they gathered in the room that Ruth shared with Mary to go over her runes.

“It's more than just combining the different runes,” Ruth began to explain. “I can't just try every possibility and see what happens. For one thing, I have to build the entire rune-chain at once, so I have to have the mana for all of it. Right now, I can only manage two runes, even when I keep them small.”

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

Josh and Mary nodded. It made sense to them.

Darius was writing down notes. “I presume there's another reason you can't simply attempt every two-rune combination.”

“If I get it wrong, it explodes.”

Everyone looked up at that. Mary actually grabbed her hand in concern.

Ruth waved her hands frantically. “No, it's okay! It's not dangerous, more like... a big pop!” She mimed something popping with her hands and jumped a little in her seat, as if she had been startled. “It was fine.”

Josh, however, was remembering some of the things he had heard about Enchanters. “Two runes aren't dangerous. What about more?”

Everyone fell silent at that.

Ruth forced a smile. “Which is why I have to be careful!” She pulled out a pad of paper. “I have eight runes right now, plus the four connector runes. The elemental runes are easy—Geo is earth, Anemo is air, Pyro is fire, and Vareo is gravity.” She sketched the last rune, then pointed to the earth and air runes. “It's a combination of earth and air, but it's its own rune. I don't know how many of them can be condensed like that.”

“Gravity is a higher-tier element,” Josh pointed out. “That probably has something to do with it.”

Darius nodded. “It's Exemplary-tier. Perhaps if you have all the Basic-tier and Improved-tier elements, you can simply combine them to create the runes for Exemplary-tier and Master-tier elements.”

Ruth made a face. “I don't know... this gravity rune is pretty complex. It's not just like mashing the two runes together will work. I tried that, and it wouldn't even activate. It was like trying to put mana into a blank piece of wood.”

Josh raised an eyebrow. “Wot? Can you actually do that?” Infusing objects wasn't an Enchanter ability.

Ruth shrugged. “Sure! Doesn't do much, though. Just makes the object stronger for a while, and I can suck the mana back out at a loss. Like a really mucky battery.”

“That's not nothing, though.” He thought for a minute. “You said something about a Capacity rune, yeah? For storing mana that powers the runes?”

She nodded eagerly.

“Can you use that for a battery? Just... pour a bunch of mana into it and then take it back out later?” He knew Enchanters could make batteries, both for themselves and for others, he was just unclear as to how. This sounded like as good a place to start as any.

“Sure! I did it already, actually. But it doesn't increase my mana pool, so I can't use it to cast bigger spells.”

Well, that was unfortunate, but hardly unexpected. If she could expand all their mana pools, even by just a few points, his crafting would really take off. But if it was that easy, he would have heard about it before. There were ways to increase your mana pool with magic items, usually with something that gave a simple bonus to your Capacity score. He just didn't think she'd be able to make those any time soon.

“All right, what else...” Josh drummed his fingers for a moment. “What matters with your runes? Is it just the combination?”

Ruth shook her head. “As far as I can tell, everything matters. Vareo-wa-Ful creates the Gravity axes, as you saw, but Ful-wa-Vareo doesn't seem to do anything, even though it is a valid rune-chain!” She threw up her hands. “I don't know what to do with it all!”

Josh was a little lost with her specific terminology. Mary seemed to be in much the same boat, and though Darius was probably fine, he was also too busy taking notes to talk. Still, Josh got the information he needed.

“Right,” he said after a moment. “Does the location of the runes matter? You put your runes on our hatchet heads. What if you put them on the handles, instead?”

“That's explained in the basic rune description,” Ruth said, in a matter-of-fact tone. “The effect will be centered on the rune. I think for more complex runes, or more complex objects, moving the runes around has more of an effect.” She shrugged. “When it's just about gravity, the effect of the location is obvious. But what if I figured out how to make bags of holding? Where should the runes go, and does it matter?”

Josh stared at her for a good, long moment.

“Please tell me you at least know how to make a bag of holding,” he said, trying not to sound like he was begging. Even though that was exactly what he was doing.

“I imagine that it would require, at minimum, use of the Space element,” Darius pointed out. He didn't look up from his notes. “That's a Master-tier element. Even supposing she did manage to find the right runes and combine them into this more advanced form, she doesn't have the Space-type mana to power it.”

Josh snapped his fingers at that. “That's what you need to make next. A mana converter.”

Ruth shrugged. “I don't know, colorless mana has been working for me so far.”

“But it would work better if it was actually the right mana type,” he insisted. “Besides, once you figure out how to make your runes draw in their own mana from the air, it will be a problem.” Humans had colorless mana, but all other mana had an elemental affinity. Those affinities didn't usually play nice together. Ruth's gravity rune, being a combination of Geo and Anemo, could presumably draw from either earth or air mana, but Josh doubted anything good would happen if someone tried to power it with fire. She'd need a converter to make sure her creations could work anywhere.

“Regardless, she doesn't have the right runes,” Darius pointed out, far too reasonably. “We'll see if we can find some magic items tomorrow morning.”